Seeding the Brainstorming Clouds

If brainstorming ideas don’t flow freely, you can try at least three things to help.

Think about responsibilities, desires, and priorities to generate ideas

First, remind yourself of responsibilities, desires or priorities that are linked to whatever you are brainstorming about. Right now, we’ve been trying to give ourselves time to think about personal areas we’d like to be more successful in. We could try seeding the clouds, then, by jotting down specific personal responsibilities, ambitions and priorities you’d like to have more success with in your personal life.

Ask yourself questions to generate ideas

Second, you can always try asking yourself prying and prodding questions about the area. In this case, we’d want to ask questions about different aspects of our personal life. Here are some examples:

• How is my current morning routine helping me prepare for the day? How is it hindering me?
• What are the parts of my morning routine? Could I even call it a routine?
• What about my devotional life is rich and bearing fruit? What about it is dry and perfunctory? What is nonexistent?
• How readily am I able to meet routinely with myself? Impossible? Comfortable?
• Should I be more concerned about my lack of personal reading? If so, what should I change: the amount of time? the subject matter?
• What things do I already do that I consider relaxing, enriching? Do these activities get sufficient time? Too much time?
• What about our home mission is suffering because of weak input from me?

Gather ideas from others

Finally, you can seek out specific ideas from other people–hopefully, not just to be lazy and use someone else’s idea, but as a way to jump start your own mind’s thinking. Again, for our purposes, we’re looking for project ideas that will lend themselves to being built into a cycle we can oversee during our weekly meeting with ourselves. Read through the following ideas from other people. Perhaps one will make a good starter project for you:

• Time different parts of your daily private space tidy-up (or what you think you would do if you did tidy your private space each day) over the next two weeks
• Time your morning dressing routine three times a week for the next two weeks.
• Find and prepare a new menu item either once a week or once every two weeks for the next month
• Take one day a week to plan one day’s menus. Keep working at the cycle until you have a week of planned meals (two weeks? Three weeks?)
• Spend fifteen minutes in prayer each day, but cycle through different times you take to pray: early morning; commuting time; lunch hour; following dinner; before bed
• Read one article a day from a news magazine, general interest magazine or online source (try www.aldaily.com) for the next week, or one week each month
• Read one article a week for the next month
• Write a different family member at least once a week
• Prepare a study cycle for test preparation
• Eat nothing after 7:30 pm for the next two weeks
• Do your Bible reading out loud for the next three weeks
• Select two books to read before your birthday
• Play a game with all family members at least once a week for the next month
• Thoroughly research one possible car purchase a week for the next four weeks
• List all the mechanical maids in your home. Research the care and maintenance of one item a week for the next month
• Listen to a symphony performance once a week for the next month
• Play through the hymnbook, 1 hymn a day on your chosen instrument
• Read a hymn as a piece of poetry as part of your devotions each day for the next two weeks
• Read fifteen minutes a day from the Harvard Classics (can be found at www.Bartleby.com)
• Read fifteen minutes a day from a missionary biography. Can you estimate how long it will take to finish based on the first three days of reading?
• Add one vegetable or fruit serving to your daily diet each week for the next five weeks

You can see that many, many ways of challenging yourself exist, and, usually, any given idea could be approached from several different angles. If you are excited about your project and want to let me know what you’ll be cycling through for the next week or two, write to prioritystewardship@gmail.com and share your project. Maybe we’ll get some fresh ideas for our ever expanding list.